Documenting Cultural Heritage with Cutting-Edge Technology: Investigations of the Klezmer Archive Project

• In Event: Digital Zamlers: The Oral Torah & Realizing An-sky's Dream of Engaged Jewish Culture-Making

Abstract

Humans and the cultural traditions surrounding community and art are deeply complex and wonderfully messy! The Jewish community has a long tradition of preserving cultural memory through text, image, recordings and material culture, and an implacable drive to archive and assemble. Cutting-edge technology is making it possible to dig even deeper into the “DNA” of culture, both through large-scale studies, and via intimate dives into the intricacy of language and pattern. By embracing messiness—unknown dates, multiple names, conflicting data, multiplicity— the Klezmer Archive team is blazing new ground by developing ways to document oral transmission through teachers, mentors, and families, and creating frameworks to record the complexity of klezmer genre and social functions without collapsing into rigid categories. Integrating musical search and analytical tools will make a corpus of non-classical western music available to a wide audience of researchers in musicology, corpus studies, and ethnomusicology. Deploying the power of knowledge engine technology together with robust, domain-specific ontologies will give humanists more flexibility in the use of cutting-edge digital tools to assist in the collection, organization, and evaluation of cultural information. This presentation will give you a glimpse into the Klezmer Archive's potential to allow humanists, performers, and archivists to work together to tell the story of communities, arts, and cultures in a more comprehensive way than has been previously possible. While this talk will include technical components, you don't have to be a tech wizard or a musician to enjoy this talk—anyone interested in documenting folklore, cultural tradition, rituals, language, music, and more is welcome!

Author

• Max Rothman, The Klezmer Institute